


Usefulness Outlived

by Skullbones



Category: MediEvil (Video Games)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 05:28:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28558347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skullbones/pseuds/Skullbones
Summary: Don't trust genies.
Kudos: 3





	Usefulness Outlived

Dan's head swam with faded memories and pulsed with a dull pain. Attempts to blink away the grogginess threatening to plunge him back into unconsciousness only resulted in a stinging in his remaining, fetid eye. Despite his pain, Dan could not help but feel grateful that his little friend had been so quiet for him while he shrugged off his latest near-permadeath experience...until that gratefulness churned into dread. 

Al was so quiet because he was no longer in Dan's head. As soon as the realization hit, so did the memories. 

Dan had narrowly avoided falling debris only for his temple to connect with a jagged rock as molten stone boiled up at him from Hell, itself while the genie in his head was launched out of Dan's empty socket!   
Dan's eyelids shot open despite the pain plaguing him and his eye rolled around wildly in its socket as he desperately tried to search for his missing friend.

He was not met with molten stone nor the gates of the Hall of Heroes, but only with a cold and dark room. Dan's long, spindly limbs flailed for purchase while he fought to right himself and stand. Out of the corner of his eye Dan could see two long and stark white arms jutting out from under a pile of rock, a once golden trident quickly rusting after the death of its master still clutched in those knotted hands of his slain adversary.

"Al?" Dan finally called out, his own voice echoing off the walls of the cavern as well as the walls in his head.   
No answer.  
"Al? Can you hear me? Where are you? Are you alright?" Dan searched the immediate rock piles and even the soles of his boots, but found no sign of Al-Zalam.  
Dan tries to swallow the dread burbling in his long decomposed stomach. He never thought treasured silence would instill such fear in his heart. Grief roiled in Dan's chest while anger boiled in his heart; grief for once again failing to protect his friends and anger for his own inability that allowed this tragedy to befall him once again.

"Al-Zalam if you are hiding, come out right now! This is not funny!" Dan threw his head back and cried out into the darkness.  
"You called?" came a cool voice from above, nearly making Dan jump out of his armor. 

Dan cranes his neck up to meet the genie casually floating above him. In front of Al-Zalam a heavy tome levitated along with him. Al sighs and unceremoniously tears out the page he was looking at and tosses it carelessly over his shoulder. Glancing down, Dan saw hundreds of pages littering the cracked stone floor. Sinister scrawlings and demonic portraits covered every page, save for the every odd picture of scantily clad goats somehow mixed into the discarded pages.

"You're safe! I was..." Dan began.  
"Worried? For my safety? Oh, Daniel...if only you knew..." Al interrupted as he tore another page from Zarok's book and dropped it as if it dribbled venom onto his palm.  
Dan squints his eye at Al. Something seemed...off...about the genie. He was larger, but that was to be expected when he was freed from Dan's skull. Al's voice lacked its quirk; it had become low and radiated a sullenness. Al rolls his eye and rips out a new page and balls it up in his claws before bouncing it off of the levitating spellbook.

Dan's eye follows the abused paper to the floor before returning his gaze to his friend.  
"Are you feeling well? You don't seem to be yourself."  
Al-Zalam chuckles and shakes his head slightly "This is the best I've felt in a century. You know, you've played your part beautifully, Daniel. You have destroyed Zarok for me and quenched my thirst for revenge without me hardly raising a claw. Zarok sought to enslave me, abducting me from my realm and when he failed to bind me to a vessel, he trapped me within your empty head. He waited for my sanity to wane and often visited your tomb to mock me. Watching the last spasms of life leave his corpse was cathartically amusing." the genie smiled as he recalled Zarok's final moments. Dan couldn't help but shiver.

"Well...uh...you're welcome...what are you going to do now? Will you return to wherever you came from? You mentioned you had a family back home." Dan asks awkwardly shifting from one foot to the other as a handful of pages flutter around him like slaughtered butterflies.  
"Home? Family? Oh, no no no, Dan. I have no family, you see. I made them up and you fell for it like the simpleton you are. As for home...well...with Zarok out of the way, your quaint little Gallowmere is practically bursting with magic! A perfect place for me to grow even more powerful! I was curious to see if Zarok had any spells I had not yet learned, but this spell book is worthless. I learned all of these tricks while I was still what your kind would consider a child. For Zarok to call himself a sorcerer with such little skill is an embarrassment!" Al chuckles as the tome before him suddenly bursts into green flames. The book unleashes an unholy scream as the fire eats its pages and curls its covers before falling to the ground as a blackened husk.

"W-Well he was powerful enough to imprison you and-" Dan began but was quickly silenced by angry smoke billowing out from Al's mouth.  
"Zarok was only able to capture me because he used trickery! He could not face me head on and he feared me when I resisted his pitiful attempt to control me! I nearly had him by the time he threw embers into my eye!" Al-Zalam's body ignites with fury and fire erupts at Dan's feet, making him stumble back to avoid the flames. 

"I don't want to have to hurt you, Al! Stop this and we can put this behind us!" Dan draws his crossbow on impulse.  
"You dare raise a weapon against me, Dan? How shameful...and I thought you wanted to be friends..." Al-Zalam hissed through a deadly smile, liquid flames dribbling out from between his teeth.  
"Tell me, Daniel...do you know what a genie is? Have you any idea as to what I truly am?"  
Dan makes a motion as if he were swallowing the dust in his disintegrated throat. When he doesn't answer, Al laughs.

"I figured you didn't, Dan. You truly do not know what you are trying to face! Regardless, you've completed your quest and now mine begins. You have defeated Zarok by accidentally utilizing your natural clumsiness to your advantage, but I am afraid that will not work against me for I am not a feeble old man. However, letting you continue your undead existence will, no doubt, cause problems for me. It would also be so very selfish of me to keep you from your just reward for your...service."

The ground beneath Dan's feet was replaced with air as Dan was thrown helplessly around Zarok's lair. With a flick of his wrist, Al-Zalam slams Dan's body against an adjacent wall before flinging him clear across the rubble encrusted arena. The crossbow Dan once attempted to wield clatters to the ground, far from its wielder's grasp.  
Dan barely had the time to blink the stars from his vision before he was once again thrown into the air and dashed against the fallen remains of the arena.   
"You're still holding on aren't you, Dan? I will give you that much. I swear I could have seen your spark of life dissipate from your eye. Your journey has made you strong, but there is no shame in letting go when your time arrives." Al-Zalam pinches his forefinger and thumb together and Dan's ankles snapped together as if they were held between those fingers. Dan's cry was swallowed in his throat when he was lifted by his ankles into the air. He scrambles to fish out any weapon he could grab, but when Al began to shake his hand to jostle everything Dan held from his weapons, to little knick-knacks he'd picked up on the road, and even bits of his armour clattered to the ground and out of Dan's reach. Al watched unflinchingly as Dan's precious life bottles shattered against the stone below.

"Now...shall we try this again? Close your eyes and think of your happy place, Dan. A nice cozy grave, your home in life. your place in your precious Hall of Heroes..." Al-Zalam trailed off while drawing his hand back. The last thing to enter Dan's sight was the rapidly approaching black stone below, he heard a loud crash of twisting metal, and he felt a rush of pain, then nothing.


End file.
